HIEU 3390

great professor! very interesting course!

I loved this class. I am a history major with a particular interest in World War II, so this was right up my alley. If you have taken other 3000-level history classes, this class is pretty similar. Each week we had readings and maybe a film with a one-page reflection. There were two reflection portfolios (easy), and two projects. The first project was an essay using sources from class, and the second you could choose her prompts or do you own project. I made a film. The midterm was standard - terms and an essay. She chose the easiest terms and two essay prompts from the review. The final should be similar.

Overall, I highly recommend this class if you enjoy cultural studies (we look at a lot of films, primary sources, and testimonies), learning about Nazi Germany, or are looking for a history class. We didn't have any assignments that required outside research, which was nice (so no 10-page research papers).
The TA Emily is also great!

This was a really well-organized history class. 45% of the final grade was a combination of 300-350 word weekly responses (graded for completion) and attendance/participation. I felt like this structure (specifically the minimum length of the weekly responses) was effective in making me actually do the majority of the readings. I have very rarely done that for a class at UVA, and although the readings were fairly time-consuming some weeks, I respected Professor Achilles for making many of them effectively mandatory. Further, I generally found the readings interesting, as they come from a broad diversity of sources. Many were movies produced in Germany before or during the Nazi regime. Additionally, I thought Prof. Achilles was a reasonably lenient grader on exams and the final project/essay (20% of the grade). My only qualm was that she regularly devoted a significant amount of time to housekeeping, review, and/or partner brainstorming exercises at the beginning of class which really cut into lecture time and lessened the amount of material we were able to cover. With only 100 minutes of lecture per week, I really look forward to listening to professors speak during history lectures, but we lost a substantial amount of that time in this course.